“Whatever they considered would be most conductive to His glory”: The Religious Conversion of Thomas Fortune Ryan

Born in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1851, Thomas Fortune Ryan left home in his teens for Baltimore, Maryland, where, with the assistance of his uncle, he met his future father-in-law, John S. Barry. Ryan, who worked for Barry, became involved with his family and adopted the Barry’s religion, Catholicism, which would become the bedrock of Thomas’s life. The highly-devotional form of Catholicism that the Barry family introduced to Ryan provided grounding for him since as a child he had lost both his parents and seen his home in Virginia destroyed by the Civil War. Ryan and his first wife, Ida, who was John Barry’s oldest daughter, were potentially two of the Catholic Church’s most significant lay patrons in the early twentieth century, funding nearly one hundred schools, hospitals, churches, and seminaries during their lifetimes, including one of their best-known works of philanthropy, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Richmond, Virginia.